Within the United States, 'mixed race' has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for 'mixed-race' identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of 'mixed race' to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

For fans of Tayari Jones and Ruth Ozeki, from National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Rizzuto comes a haunting and suspenseful literary tale set in 1970s New York City and World War II-era Japan, about three strong women, the dangerous ties of family and identity, and the long shadow our histories can cast.

Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and 1960s, so close they shared the same nickname. Raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving but unstable mother, they were fatherless, mixed-race, and utterly inseparable, devoted to one another. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent, nearly fatal betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed foreverâ€“until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hanaâ€™s lonely Manhattan doorstep with a secret that will change everything.

Told in interwoven narratives that glide seamlessly between the gritty streets of New York, the lush and dangerous landscape of Hawaii, and the horrors of the Japanese internment camps and the bombing of Hiroshima, Shadow Child is set against an epic sweep of history. Volcanos, tsunamis, abandonment, racism, and war form the urgent, unforgettable backdrop of this intimate, evocative, and deeply moving story of motherhood, sisterhood, and second chances.